


you held on tight (a flash of light)

by jeannedarc



Category: Akdong Musician, Chungha (Musician), EXO (Band), NCT (Band), Red Velvet (K-pop Band), SHINee, Sunmi (Korea Musician), Triple H (Korea Band), VIXX, 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Drug Use, Everyone knows everyone's business, F/F, F/M, Familial Relationships, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Jealousy, M/M, Multi, Platonic Relationships, Polyamory, Sexual Relationships, Spin the Bottle, i mean it's a party, i mean it's the end of the world, just the whole gamut, no one cares, romantic relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 02:51:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20735051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeannedarc/pseuds/jeannedarc
Summary: when the world comes crashing down, who's ready to party?





	you held on tight (a flash of light)

**Author's Note:**

> y'all thought i was playing when i said everyone was here and i WASN'T  
this self-indulgent shout-out to my friends' favourite pairings and a few of my favourite concepts almost didn't get finished but i'm really happy it did and really happy that i can share it with all of you  
shout out to [riley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toastyhyun) and maddie who held my hand through most of this  
shout out to sinny who helped me work out the planning logistics of most of the second half of this  
special thanks to all the poor people on my various writing discord servers who heard me yell about this for two months before i finally got it done  
shout out to [elle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/refugeren/) who is always my person through all of these things and who lets me just yell about all the things who are frustrating me

When the first escape ships took to the sky, everyone who'd been left behind watched them on the feeds, their drinks in hand and their dizziness far beyond their control. They peered out from behind their gas masks, as if the protection had helped anything, and occasionally lifted the heavy filter in order to sip away their sorrows at having been abandoned to their fate.

Everyone processes their impending doom differently; everyone has their own way. Some people curse whatever creative force had thought it a good idea to give magic to humanity in the first place; some band together to protest the corrupt government, who had chosen not to regulate glyph usage in favour of developing technology to make life easier instead; some people simply crawl into their holes, wait for the end to come.

When the bunkers are full to their intended capacity, and the doors close for everyone (save the intrepid adventurer sent surface-side to collect supplies a couple times a week), everything seems so...final. The liquor stores don’t seem to dry up near as fast as they should, all things considered; not a single day goes by that some incident doesn’t occur.

Mark's mouth constantly tastes of whiskey, which Taeyong gets a taste of every time they dare remove their masks -- an event happening less and less frequently these days, as the glitter dust that has taken over the planet's atmosphere threatens to fill up their lungs even here, in a bunker far beneath the surface -- and complains about, only to be met with Mark rolling his eyes, impetuous and done with what little remains of his life. He has given up.

Taeyong is one of the few who have not, but the minority of it means that he is overruled in most major decisions, sent up to the surface to collect potion-brewing ingredients, implements for alchemy, whatever the community needs in order to survive this thing as long as they possibly could. Seungwan is always asking him for brass instruments to read the stars. Taeyong has to laugh. Of course Seungwan wants to read the stars, and nevermind the fact that there aren't any more to look at. It is how she'd charmed Yerim, among others, into bed with her.

Everyone knows everyone's business, down here. Taeyong can't help but know the romantic and the lurid, the extraordinary and the mundane. He is keeping them in journals, like anyone is ever going to read them.

No magic can save anyone. It is, after all, the end of the world.

Mark and Taeyong had ended up together purely by circumstance. The glitter had sparked light on Taeyong's HAZMAT suit as it had caught in the sun on their second date, back when things had still been tolerable and there was talk from the governments about fighting back, like there was anything anyone could even think to do. They were talking about aliens and sitting outside a café that had closed its doors months prior. Everything was liminal, now.

"Would you get on one of those escape ships, if you could?" Taeyong had asked, and though Mark wasn't supposed to be able to see his face, reflection being the enemy of human skin at this point now they'd fought off the dust, he squinted to see the brightness of his eyes through his visor anyway. The café windows were lined with advertisements for escape into a colony that had been built months before, suspiciously devoid of price listing.

"If I could," Mark agreed, hiding the lament that rose up in him.

"I know some people," Taeyong started to say, but then clamped his mouth shut. "Would you fuck on one of those escape ships?"

The conversation had devolved from there, Mark's suit tenting uncomfortably. He was grateful they'd sat and talked long enough that he could will his erection away without turning into some kind of whiny mess about it. It might have been the end times, but that didn't mean his pride would suddenly give way just because the solar system had.

They were walking back to Taeyong's apartment, Mark's only intention being that of making sure Taeyong got home safe -- times were strange in the impending apocalypse, and the looting rose up in intent waves, as if someone was orchestrating them, sinister and clandestine -- when the sirens raised, and the bunkers that had been built underground at the last threat of war opened their heavy metal doors.

They had clasped gloved hands as they made their way to their assigned spots, ready to wait out the threat as it happened.

More often than not these things were drills, but as it happened, they didn't really get to leave after that. As time wore on, weeks passing and rations sent out in varying states depending on who was in charge of preparing them and doling them out, Taeyong and Mark grew tired of one another. Certainly, back on the surface of things, they could have had a normal relationship, stayed together a couple of years, talked about kids before realising that it just wouldn't work. The only truly nagging thing about their relationship as it was happening was that it seemed to happen as quickly as magical decomposition: five minutes of application here, ten minutes there, and suddenly everything they were, everything they could have been, collapsed.

Mark tasted of whiskey, sure, but Taeyong smelled of outside, and Mark couldn't hide his jealousy.

It’s like this when they hunker down together, half-naked and starving for something they can’t have, their hands grasping at one another’s limbs, their faces, their hair. Every time they fuck it’s something hateful, something heavy on their conscience, their envy and anger toward one another making these sessions into arguments, and their arguments into fights that they’d solve with fists if they could stand the thought of hurting one another.

“I can’t fucking stand you,” Mark says, buried deep in Taeyong, fingertips pressing bruises into his hipbones standing out stark in these -- their times of great desperation and hunger. “You look like you’ve got glitter on you, do you wanna bring that shit down and kill us all?”

“Maybe,” Taeyong pants out, and folds in on himself further, burying his face in a paper-thin pillow so he doesn’t have to answer any more stupid questions.

But when the dust settles and their fight is over, Taeyong curls up in bed, something small and vulnerable, his formerly bright eyes twinkling with something that reeks of regret. “I can’t believe I ever looked at you,” he says, fist to his mouth, but the quavering of his voice says he doesn’t mean it in the least.

Mark hates that he knows this, that he’s able to discern exactly what Taeyong is feeling just by the way he hurls insults. 

///

They’re all called to the main room of the bunker at the same time, the same mysterious glyph written on their feeds, its owner someone they can’t identify despite knowing one another like the backs of their own eyelids. Yoongi had been in the middle of a nap -- though he’s vaguely inspired to rebel against whatever there is left to rebel against, he can't seem to reconcile rebellion with resignation. And that is fair. Namjoon reminds him all the time that sometimes, at the hour of death, cats went to be alone instead of with the people they loved most.

Yoongi, for one, fucking hates being compared to a cat in this instance, but Namjoon is the cutest thing he'd seen thus far in this nightmare hellscape of a bunker, so he gave him a free pass, even though his constant midnight readings of Voltaire done by candlelight "for authenticity" makes Yoongi want to shove him through the wall.

Maybe that isn't Namjoon at all, he realises upon further consideration as he bunches together with the other bunkers. They all stand shoulder to shoulder, so close he can feel breath on the back of his neck, making him feel like he might throw someone else through a wall if they step a hair out of their personal bubble and into his instead. His nap had been important, goddamnit. He’s tired, hasn’t been sleeping well. Maybe that’s the constant arguing coming from the couple next door. Maybe it’s the fact that human beings aren’t meant to be trapped inside hollow metal boxes just barely big enough for hamsters to get their exercise. He can't say, and doesn't feel much like trying.

Late at night, Yoongi and Namjoon had read up on the environmental effects of the glitter that had taken to the air recently. Yoongi didn't understand much of it, if he was being honest; his degree was in audio engineering, and while that might help him to develop some therapeutic soundtrack to keep his bunkermates from killing one another, it didn’t do much in the face of the earth falling apart at the seams. 

Namjoon, English lit major, only got a little bit more, but broke it down in stilted sentences that poured from his mouth the more he read. "It comes from everyone doing magic.” He was idly tracing the shape of someone else’s glyph on the surface of their shared desk, Yoongi lounging on the couch near the door, ready to bolt in case it got heavy. “There's no return on a physical person for using their glyph, but there is a return on the earth itself, since it’s the earth that provides all the fuel for the magic we do on a daily basis.”

Yoongi startled at that, hand to his heart. 

“It's been building for awhile now. People wasting glyph usage on stuff that doesn't matter. It's like...like magic has come back to mess with us for making our lives easier."

Yoongi didn't do magic, one of the rare people who did not have a glyph of his own by which to do his own special brand of whatever. Everything he did was with his own hands. It sucked, to have to pay the price for everyone else’s ineptitude, even if he did encourage his idiot friends to do whatever they needed to in order to find their keys so they could get to work on time.

Even now, in this room, surrounded by his bunkermates and genuinely wishing the end would hurry the fuck up and come, he's reminded of that: that he's unable to do the one thing that seems to make people _human_, at least in this reality.

Namjoon, his only friend at this moment -- the others, their group, their _family_ had been assigned to other bunkers -- is, at the very least, a sort of comfort in this time of need.

Overhead, a screen flickers to life, archaic and so bright everyone collectively flinches away from it. Namjoon took Yoongi's hand in his own, just for a moment, and hated that Namjoon was so able to just... _do_ that. "Knock it off," he sighed, but didn't let go.

Namjoon just smiled, and Yoongi felt fond all over again.

From behind them a girl -- Seungyeon, he thought, though he'd barely spoken with her during the entirety of their tenure as de facto roommates -- called out a question: "What're we doing here?"

In response, the walls opened up, and there was...alcohol. Cigarettes. Probably a lot of other illicit things. Food -- not the rations, the prepackaged, made-to-survive-nuclear-war bullshit they'd been eating the past few weeks, but the comforts of the consumerist world. Condoms, which was a little weird -- they were going to die, what did it matter if anyone caught anything? If someone got pregnant? Everything was lit up with neon, bright and flashy and irritating. Yoongi simultaneously hated what he knew was about to happen, and appreciated the fact that everyone was collectively transfixed by it, their heads swiveling toward the light sources in an almost eerie unison.

On the screen flashed a face familiar to all involved: Jackson Wang, the one who never showed up, whose features were plastered on MISSING posters that no one would never be able to call in for. It'd been a platitudinal gesture at best, friends looking to console themselves by saying they did something. But there he was, grinning down at them, and Yoongi smiled back in spite of himself. College towns were sleepy during the day; Jackson had once been the uniting force for all of them, and to see him is a comfort beyond comfort, like coming home to your favourite childhood cartoons already playing on the television.

"So the world is ending!" Jackson announced cheerily, "We've all seen the broadcasts. Most of us haven't seen the surface in ages. The earth is finally collapsing in on herself." This particular portion is jeered by everyone in the room, Yoongi included. "I know, I know. It's the worst thing to ever happen, ever, for any reason. Which is why I decided something: I have lots of party stores. Some of you know my reputation or whatever. Some of you don't, and that’s okay -- better late than never, they always say. But some of you in this very room have been to my parties." He stared into the camera for an uncomfortable pause.

"I've left you all my party supplies. There's no need for any money or anything, so all my suppliers have given me everything you guys will need for a good time. I brought snacks. And condoms. For some people it's a comfort thing, y'know?" That's met with a couple snickers. "I'm like that mom in Mean Girls, aren't I." This he seems to mumble off-screen to someone else entirely, and is met with an almost haughty chuckle. "Anyway! I know things are bad, because we're basically all gonna die, but I want everyone to have one last good time."

Already, a couple people are flocking to find themselves something to eat, someone going as far as moaning about _finally some good fucking food_ as they tear into a family size bag of Spicy Nacho Doritos.

Yoongi curls his hand around Namjoon's, tighter now, their fingers interlacing. It's a mutual gesture. "D'you wanna get out of here?" asks Namjoon, with that knowing twinkle in his eyes.

For a long moment, Yoongi thinks about this. Does he want to spend the end of his pitifully short life alone in a room? After all, he doesn't expect Namjoon to stay with him once he's settled in their shared bunk. ("Cellmates for life," Yoongi had joked when they'd claimed the same room at the same time. It isn't funny now, but Yoongi smiles anyhow.) Or does he want to have some fucking fun and forget about things?

No, he doesn't, but he will anyway. In the spirit of what everyone else seems to know, but he doesn’t feel.

Everything seems to crash into existence around him, a wave of bodies rushing toward the walls, everyone trapped here underground doing their best, scavenging for the best things. Yoongi turns to face Namjoon, who’s got those soft eyes that manage to make Yoongi feel loved without feeling pitied at the same time and shakes his head. “No, I want to stay,” he says, gruff, a natural reaction to whatever gentleness anyone shows him. “I’ll be fine. You think they got a beer or two somewhere in here?”

It’s a joke, but a poor one. Namjoon cracks a wry smile, so big the shadow of his dimples threatens his face. He’s beautiful, like this, at the end of the world. “I’ll take care of you,” he says, “just go sit down, alright.”

So Yoongi does, and he doesn’t feel super different about making a decision instead of letting one be made for him, but he’s done that for himself. At least, when he goes, he’ll be able to say that for himself.

///

There are times in which Sunmi was doing spellwork, writing new shapes in new glyphs on the bunker wall, so focused that the tip of her tongue prodded out from between her gorgeous lips, that Chungha can’t believe her luck. Something incongruous wrinkles her brain, in those moments, when she’s draped in nothing but a sheet and waiting for Sunmi to come back to bed -- that Sunmi doesn’t belong here.

“Hey,” she would interrupt, and Sunmi will fix her with some wild-eyed stare, like she’d grown a second head in the time she’s had her HAZMAT suit off. 

“What’s up?” And Sunmi would drag her hand through her hair, cross the brief space of their shared bunk, brush a curl from Chungha’s forehead, her fingers still coated in chalk dust and leaving a streak across the skin. 

“Come back to bed.” And Chungha doesn’t whine, but doesn’t command, either, simply opens her arms and lets the sheet fall away and looks as if she’ll sweep Sunmi into her arms, if she’s given the chance.

Sunmi does, but there’s always that gentle worry, a line etched just over one eyebrow. Chungha knows that Sunmi thinks she can solve whatever crisis this is, that some magic will undo all the damage wrought by the expedience it has afforded humanity thus far.

She wants to drag the responsibility from Sunmi’s shoulders, and puts that in every kiss, every caress, every gentle whimper drawn from her by skilled lips and fingertips. There is so much love inside her that she does not know whether or not it comes across between them.

As everyone clusters round, their party plans in place just as they come to mind, Sunmi and Chungha have their arms wound around one another. There is a rigidity to Sunmi’s frame, and a guilt in that wrinkle above her brow the likes of which Chungha is sure she can’t explain away. “Hey,” she says with a nudge, “is everything okay?”

“Not really!” Sunmi singsongs, inching closer, resting her forehead on Chungha’s shoulder and guiding them to one of the couches tucked behind a door, propped open with an encyclopedia on magical creatures and how best to take advantage of them. How does Sunmi make herself look so small, anyway? It must be something about her magic that shrinks her down, the burden of genius weighing her down. In the process of their short journey, a bag of fun-sized candy bars ends up pressed into Chungha’s hand and she carries it with them, sure they’ll end up sharing sweets like they will kisses and heavy looks and conversation the likes of which Chungha can’t get anywhere else. 

The side of her neck tingles, and she looks up to find someone staring at the coupling between herself and Sunmi, who’s humming some song under her breath, her fingers flexing in the way that tells Chungha that she’s itching to work on something. “Hey, who’s that girl?” she asks her girlfriend, tipping back just enough that she can peer down her nose and into the infinite curve of Sunmi’s gorgeous eyelashes when they flutter against her cheek.

“Huh?” Sunmi straightens up, now, glances around, sees-- “Oh, that’s Seulgi! Hi, Seulgi!” And just like that she’s detached from Chungha’s side, floating over to see this girl that Chungha has never noticed before, almost like she snuck into the bunker to get into a party. A crasher. That’s the word. Chungha’s brow furrows as she watches Sunmi start chatting it up, brushing the same curl from Seulgi’s forehead that she’d do to Chungha’s right before bed.

She does know Seulgi, now she can see and has a positive ID -- growing up in a college town means basically knowing everyone even if you don’t go to uni there, and Chungha’s got that knowledge in spades. It helps a lot that Sunmi, four years her senior and a vested acquaintance for longer than Chungha cares to acknowledge, is probably the most popular girl in town for a number of reasons, not the least of which were once her group tutoring sessions that she ran as a part-time gig. It got her invited to parties, probably still would. She knows more about the language and etiquette in these situations than Chungha herself, a fact that’s evident in the way she sidles past people setting up a beer pong table to make way for the conversation being had, tugs Seulgi by the elbow to lead her along. 

Point being, Chungha _does_ know Seulgi, has seen her around in spaces like these, and in libraries late at night, worry to the set of her features. She’d be jealous that apparently Sunmi knows her better if there weren’t the very obvious fact that Seulgi is not supposed to be here. It’s with this in mind that Chungha dances through gathering crowds, light on her feet even a couple drinks down, and joins in.

They’re all going to die and whatever, and Chungha’s come to accept that, but for some reason the fact that she’s not getting all the attention she deserves isn’t acceptable in the slightest.

She skirts around a couple of dudes holding hands, one death-glaring at his every surrounding, the other seeming to talk the first through some sort of mental breakdown, and joins the conversation her girlfriend is having. “Hi,” she intones, a bit stout, a bit shy, though she does her best to be cordial about it. It’s a fail. If this were a dice roll she’d have thrown a natural 1. 

Seulgi, though, is bright and brilliant even though it’s clear she doesn’t want to be here; something about her aura simply draws Chungha in, though she wants more than anything to resist. “Hi,” she greets with a wave of her hand, “nice to meet you.” A pause. “Sunmi was telling me you two are bunkmates?”

“Yeah, we’ve been down here...what, four weeks?” Chungha lifts a shoulder, glances Sunmi’s direction. “It just so happened we got assigned the same bunker when the cards went out, you know?”

Sunmi sort of half-laughs, though there’s very little to find funny about the situation in Chungha’s estimation. “We were, like, waiting on the mail, right, because we thought there wouldn’t be a mail carrier anymore to bring them, and then we’d all be _totally_ screwed.” Her face screws up with that same determination Chungha sees late at night, when Sunmi is trying to solve the glitter crisis for a world full of people who don’t live on the planet anymore. “And then it came, and we didn’t want to open them, and Chungha--” She reached, put a fond hand on Chungha’s neck, fingers shaking with laughter she couldn’t yet release, “she swore up and down we were going to get separated. And we didn’t!”

Everyone processes the end of the world differently, Chungha supposes. Seulgi seems to think the same, judging by the look on her face, the faint pink in her cheeks.

“I, um, I never got mine,” Seulgi says, soft, awkward, like someone making their final confession before their priest went and died. “I was supposed to leave.” She stares at her feet. Chungha wants to cradle her from whatever she’s about to say. “I didn’t want to leave you behind.” When she glances up she fixes her eyes on Sunmi’s laughing face.

Sunmi, for her part, breaks into the most inappropriate bout of laughter anyone’s ever heard, planetside or not. “Me?” she asks, a bit incredulous as she presses her fingertips to her sternum, and someone else might think she’s having a great time but Chungha knows that look in her eyes just the same as she’d know her own -- Sunmi doesn’t know how to _handle_ such a heavy confession. Not when they’re all about to die.

Chungha takes Sunmi’s hand in her own, gives her a little squeeze, dips her head so she can peer up at Sunmi from beneath her heavy lashes. “Babe, do you need something? Do you need to sit?”

Somehow the consensus is formed that they’re all going to sit on the same couch tucked behind the propped-open door. Sunmi drapes her forever legs across both Seulgi’s and Chungha’s laps. Chungha gets the feet, drags a thumb tenderly across the slightly knobby bone of her girlfriend’s ankle. She wants to hate Seulgi, really, because who the fuck crashes a bunker party and confesses their love five minutes before the sun burns out?

She doesn’t, though. She’s just endeared by the smallness of it all, the way in which everything has happened. Maybe it’s the circumstances, or the people in the various corners kissing like their lungs might just explode if they don’t, bodies mapped by strange hands that will never really learn the right geography, but Chungha gets this wild, wild idea.

“Truth or dare?” she asks both the woman in her company, grin glittering in the fluorescence hanging over all their heads.

“Dare,” Seulgi says immediately, like she thinks it’s a challenge of some kind.

“I dare you to kiss Sunmi,” Chungha says, and the words threaten to catch in her throat. Threaten to. Do not. She’s never been the sort of girl who’s into sharing, but fuck if she won’t figure out if that’s been fed to her all her life.

Sunmi blinks, then laughs, a hysterical cry of a sound that leaves her smiling all bright and brilliant nonetheless. “It isn’t cool to kiss your ex in front of your new girlfriend,” she points out, leaning over Seulgi and batting at Chungha’s thigh.

“Yeah, but what’s the point of the game if you aren’t going to play?” Chungha points out with a raised eyebrow. 

Seulgi, Chungha has noticed, is frozen in place, and is colouring all the way down her pretty throat. Good thing they’re going to keep playing. Chungha knows she’s going to need a drink or two after this.

The proximity between Seulgi and Sunmi means that it’s easy, when Seulgi leans in and catches Sunmi’s cheek in a tender hand. Easier still when Sunmi tips her head just slightly, leaning into it. Chungha doesn’t know the exact history, wonders which ex Seulgi is on the relatively long list of stories she’s heard, every entry being nameless and faceless until now; what she knows is that this moment, right here, is tender.

She bites her bottom lip to keep from ruining that, but how good a job she does, no one will tell her.

Seulgi’s thumb drags over the pad of Sunmi’s lower lip. “Is it alright,” she asks, rather business-like considering she’s barely above a whisper, “if I kiss you, like your girlfriend asked?”

Sunmi swallows, nods, top teeth showing and eyes fluttering closed.

It lasts longer than Chungha expects it to, what for it being a dare. But then, most things do. Their lives certainly have. When they pull apart, Sunmi has a horrible gleam in her eye, the sort that lingers when she’s got one of her ill-fated world-saving ideas.

“Chungha, baby?” she asks in her sweetest voice. “Truth or dare?”

Seulgi, too, is fixing her with that same look.

Chungha grins, sideways and stupid. “Dare.”

///

So, okay, here’s the thing: everyone acts differently when they know they’re going to die. It’s just a fact of nature, right. At least that’s Jaehwan’s train of thought. So there is Jaehwan, sitting in a corner, pretending to brood while he chainsmokes an entire pack of cigarettes. All his life his family has warned against the dangers of smoking, of drinking, of drugs, so afraid that he'd ruin his perfect voice.

His parents had died due to glitter contact a month ago. He still isn't feeling super hot about it. He is, however, on some sort of pill and feeling super hot about himself right about now. He starts to ease this by working at the top button of his shirt, which he’s kept to his throat until now, afraid of contact with glitter. 

One might term this a panic about impending doom. Jaehwan just considers this a good time -- the first one he’s had in basically his whole life.

His life back home wasn’t exactly sheltered, though. He’d gone to public school, dated a few people, even fallen in love. But most of his existence was trained toward one thing and one thing alone: a career the likes of which he couldn’t just _have_, the sort that took training and dedication. His parents, huge patrons of the arts, had promised him since birth that he was going to make music. He was their contribution to the world they so lovingly frequented, though neither of them had much artistic inclination themselves.

Fuck, he hated them, growing up. Only in the last few years leading up to the worldwide glitter crisis had they gotten close, he and his mom especially. She’d called him up and offered to put him on one of the escape pods. “It’s just not right, Jaehwanie, to send scientists and doctors and people like that, but not people who can speak to someone’s _soul_.”

“I think they’re sending whoever can afford the ticket,” he’d half-joked, refusing her offer in one fell swoop. 

She’d hummed her disapproval; he could see her even through the audio-only comm, magicking together something for she and his stepfather to eat, tracing the glyphs prescribed on the page of her ages-old cookbook. “When civilisation is rebuilt,” she told him sternly, “we are going to need art. If not our culture will die out completely.”

He didn’t really cry at her funeral, but now whenever he sees even the vaguest hint of glitter in the air something inside him seizes, leaves him breathless, begging for the end to be merciful.

In any case, he’s fucked up right now, and there’s that cute guy across the room, and Taekwoon is here somewhere -- of all the people in his friend group that he’d have to be put up in a bunker with, it’d have to be _Taekwoon_; Jaehwan’s been avoiding him for the entirety of their tenure here thus far -- but he isn’t here, _right here_, which basically gives Jaehwan free reign to do whatever the fuck he wants. At least as far as he and God and the natural laws of consent are concerned.

So, again, he’s feeling himself -- it’s a mantra at this point, something he keeps telling himself like his brain is the echo chamber in which they’re all sort of trapped -- and there’s a cute guy in the corner. Glasses. Curly hair, but short. Dressed in overalls? The irony of it. Like a hipster that Jaehwan actually wants to know.

He approaches, briefly interrupted by a game of spin the bottle happening in the dead center of the floor. He passes a small cluster of girls exchanging giggles and heated kisses on a couch, and makes a beeline for the target.

Maybe it would have been better for him to get to know people when he was still in school, but it’s a little late for that. 

The guy in question is standing directly under the screen that had kindly played Jackson’s message to them all. Jaehwan has been thinking of something about that since seeing it, the vague suggestion of an idea he can’t quite understand, but then the pills had kicked in, and the world got all wavy, and his worries melted away. Cool. Best feeling. It’s probably the most helpful thing, because he wobbles up to his target and flashes his best crooked grin. “Hey, I’m Jaehwan.”

The guy -- he’s so much younger up close than Jaehwan had initially anticipated and though she’s not here, he can feel Heeyeon judging him from a distance, wherever she’s at -- startles very, very physically, and leans against the wall, clutching at his heart, his whole face contorting into a wrinkle. “You scared me,” he whines, sinking down to the floor, the dangling strap of his overall clanking against the metal grate flooring.

Jaehwan stoops beside him, takes his face between his slightly-rough hands. Years of moisturising were nothing up against weeks of going without, but he’s tender about it anyway. “Hey. Did you hear me. I’m Jaehwan.”

“Hi, Jaehwan,” breathes the cutie, doing absolutely nothing to wriggle away from Jaehwan despite every indication that he probably should. “I’m Chanhyuk.”

“Chanhyuk…” The name is a little familiar, but then again, Jaehwan knows so many people. He repeats the name a couple times, whispers fed into a stream of pop music that plays just loudly enough on the screen over both their heads. “I know you from somewhere.”

“I know you from somewhere too,” Chanhyuk agrees mildly, head tilting just so, his curls catching the ambient light and looking to frame him in some sort of halo.

Jaehwan sort of envies it, because usually the halo is hung on him, and no one else. But his family aren’t there to do that to him. “Have you had a drink?” he asks after a slightly stilted silence.

“Not yet. My sister is around here somewhere, although I don’t know that I’ve seen her in awhile, but I thought I’d have to look out for her, and--”

“She’s not here?” Jaehwan cocks his head, grins something knife-sharp. “So you have time to hang out with me?”

“I mean, she’s here _somewhere_,” Chanhyuk reiterates, a bit of frustration curling down the corner of his mouth. The song playing through the bunker changes, something old and a bit slower. “Somewhere...hey, do you dance?”

Jaehwan’s grin grows. “I thought you’d never ask.”

They encircle one another, arms clutching tight, fingertips pressing into the edges of garments, Chanhyuk’s slightly-stained HAZMAT suit wrinkling noisily under Jaehwan’s touch. It is quite possibly the least sexy slow dance of all time, but they do it anyway. Jaehwan swears he feels the pills in his system wearing off; every light overhead, every scream of pleasure or moan of distress is sharper, hitting his system differently.

“It’s so weird how I know you from somewhere,” Chanhyuk prompts first, probably sensing a shift in the mood. “What did you do up there?”

“Oh, mostly acting,” Jaehwan says dismissively, tipping his head forward and showing off the brightness of his eyes in a way he knows gets him attention. “Teaching. That kind of thing. Were you in school?”

“Just graduated, actually,” and here Chanhyuk smiles, and his overbite is charming, and Jaehwan’s heart is soft, which is stupid because his dick should be getting hard instead. “Not long before the state of emergency was declared.”

“Did they even get to throw you a ceremony?” And Jaehwan laughs, a little harsher than he might were he minding his manners. “Or was it just sort of a, ‘here, take your useless piece of paper and go’ thing?”

“It is pretty useless,” Chanhyuk agrees with a laugh of his own. “Who needs an artist anymore? All the people up on the ships might be movie stars or whatever, but they took the smartest ones and left us here to work until there was nothing else left.” They turn in unison, Chanhyuk leading despite the fact that he’s a good head shorter than Jaehwan. The song has changed since, become something a lot more party-like, but it doesn’t matter, they’re doing a waltz of their own. 

“Do you wish you’d left?” Jaehwan asks after a brief lull in their conversation.

“Not at all,” Chanhyuk answers. “My sister didn’t want to leave, so…it wasn’t really a choice, for me. Can’t just leave her behind.”

“How old is she?”

“Four years younger than me.” Chanhyuk executes a spin that Jaehwan completes, and it’s almost like they’re partners made for each other. “I take care of her the best I can. It’s been harder with me finishing school and her starting, not to mention this whole--” Here he makes a vague hand gesture. “Y’know.”

“Do the two of you have parents?” Jaehwan is thinking of his own, which is cool, because he really wasn’t down to do hand stuff with this gorgeous, tiny boy anyway. Not at all. 

Chanhyuk hums a second, then says, “That’s really personal. Maybe you first?”

Jaehwan scoffs in answer. “It’s not very flirty of me to talk about my dead relatives, don’t you think?”

They press closer together, still moving in time with the music, til they’re accidentally winding toward the too-enthusiastic game of spin the bottle Jaehwan had sidestepped earlier, and nearly trip over a very young girl. Yerim. Jaehwan knows her well; judging by the look on his face, Chanhyuk does, too. “Do you mind?” she asks, craning her neck up at them.

“Yerim, have you seen Suhyun?” asks Chanhyuk, doing as directed of the two of them, much to Jaehwan’s chagrin.

“Oh, yeah, I think she was gonna go hang out with...was it Hayi? Was it…”

Chanhyuk’s nose wrinkles, something like amusement twinkling in his eyes, and Jaehwan would be stupid to say it but he’s charmed by this protective older brother act. “Okay. I don’t need to know anything else. Thank you for telling me.” He hesitates. “Are all the kids playing this game?”

“You’re the kids,” says another girl from across the circle, hiccuping to accompany the voice squeaking, as if a bunch of infants trying to kiss isn’t funny enough as it is. Mina. Jaehwan raises his brows at her, and she just sort of snickers. “Do you two want to play?”

“Nah, we have kissing partners already,” replies Jaehwan in a breeze, “but thank you.” Funny. He’d come to think of Mina as something like a little sister over the past couple weeks, but seeing her all legs-crossed and making cute eyes at Tzuyu -- he doesn’t see the need to blame her, seeing as everyone else present save himself and Chanhyuk are already making the same face -- has everything cast in a different light. Maybe it's the fact that there are those weird mirror-like disco lights overhead dropping from the ceiling and there's all these tiny beams glowing all over everyone else's face, but she seems...pretty. Happy.

He's pleased to see her that way, in any case. He doesn't deserve to be happy anymore, having wasted his life chasing a chance he'd never get, but that doesn't mean no one else deserves it.

Their slow dance doesn't end just because that conversation does. "Your parents died?" Chanhyuk presses, and Jaehwan wrinkles his nose in distaste.

"Yeah," Jaehwan mumbles, bottom lip catching behind his two front teeth so he doesn't expound further. They sway right out the door to the bunker, and into the hallway, where everything sounds muffled like those video compilations Jaehwan used to use in order to sleep. He's not really thinking about that, but he isn't thinking about hand stuff anymore. Right now he's measuring the gap of Chanhyuk's overbite, thinking deeply of moving his tongue into there until there's no more time to take up the space. "Do you wanna go back to my room?"

"Yeah, sure," Chanhyuk says with a nod, glancing up at Jaehwan, and yeah, the drugs have worn off, but that doesn't mean Jaehwan is any less feeling himself. Especially not when he catches that wicked little twinkle in Chanhyuk's eyes. "I'm gonna kiss you as soon as we get there, is that alright?"

"I'd prefer if you did it now." Their dance backs them up to a steel wall, and overhead there's this weird creaking that Jaehwan swears he's heard somewhere before.

It's the entry hatch. Someone's sneaking out. There are protocols for this, everyone's supposed to be in their suits and masks, and there's supposed to be an alarm that goes off. Jaehwan had come to dread the middle of the night scavenging trips that Taeyong and maybe someone else take when he's trying to sleep, the red lights that fill the room even though he's got his eyes closed.

This time there isn't any of that ceremony. It's just open and shut.

He doesn't know if Chanhyuk hears, figures he doesn't hear anything over the arrhythmic thumping of his heart that Jaehwan can hear against his own sternum when they press together, chest-to-chest, sweat-to-sweat.

When he catches Chanhyuk's lips in his own it's a symphony of those same alarms. For the first time, Jaehwan welcomes them.

///

"Hey, what are you doing? Where did you get those?"

Hyojong has never been much for smoking, but he'd nicked the half-pack left behind by the resident prettyboy when he'd sauntered over to hit up the clearly-younger guy alone in the corner. It seemed like a prudent thing to do: smoke while you watch the moon rise above the horizon, all beautiful and silver and huge.

Hyuna doesn't seem to like that very much, judging by the wrinkle in her nose. But then, when it comes down to it, she still kisses the corner of his mouth. She lazily stretches out beside where he's taken his seat, trapped between steel beams and nestled in on himself. Her limbs are leonine, her face an innocent and blank mask. He knows her all too well, knows she's thinking about something when she traces her lazy glyph into the sky, ignoring the glitter that starts to form against the horizon.

He's always thought of her as powerful. Perhaps she is, summoning cosmic dust storms directly outside their technically permanent home.

Hwitaek comes when the smoke is burned down almost to the tar, and he's got a half-full bottle of something clear and clearly toxic clutched in his hand. Hyuna and Hyojong eye him up and down in unison. "What're you doing here?" Hyojong asks, suspicion creeping into his voice as he lights up another cigarette, the first abandoned to whichever natural disaster will have it first.

Everyone knew about their fight, a couple weeks back, in which Hwitaek had just wanted to fucking leave, had volunteered to go on a mission with a far-too-irritable Taeyong for the sake of getting out of their metal cage. Hyuna had been the first to beg him not to go, of course, in her own way -- Hyuna didn’t beg, per se, but she and Hyojong had been together so long that he knew what it looked like on her. Hyojong hated to see her so desperate to keep something, and spoke up, his loyalty never once split so much as gently leaning to one side, a strong wind blowing it to the direction of his girlfriend.

It wasn't pretty.

"You're so fucking _selfish_," Hyojong had spat, though nervousness forced a tremour into his voice. His hands shook. He needed a smoke, and couldn't have one. It'd been weeks since he'd taken one of his favourite comforts. Judging by the look on the others' faces, he couldn't take his other anytime soon, if ever again. "We want you to be safe, and we're the ones who're keeping you somewhere? Stopping you from doing something? How stupid can you be?" It was the most he had spoken since their descent into the bunkers, he having been previously content simply to bury his face in the nearest crook, not so much confined as confining himself to bed, lest he give in to the urge to make matters worse.

Hyuna had stopped talking by that point, but it didn't matter. The devastation was plain in her eyes, in the jut of her hip as she turned away, not wanting to watch her boyfriends scowl at each other until another bout of yelling rose up between them.

"I just don't see how you two --" And Hwitaek's voice had risen so high Hyojong could barely even listen without wincing, he none too sure whether or not it was because of his blood pressure, "_you two_, of all people -- could be happy just to stay down here like nothing's happening up there!" He drew his upper lip into a snarl, and Hyojong recoiled, just a fraction, not afraid to fight so much as nervous about the close quarters in which he'd have to do it.

He stormed off, selfish as he was, a cloud of anger hovering over the three of them even at a great distance. It seemed everyone in the bunker had grouped them together; not one of them could go five minutes without being asked about the others. Their screaming at one another had echoed off the heavy steel and concrete for what seemed like days afterward.

Today is the first day no one's said anything. Hyojong doesn't know how to articulate it, especially not with Hwitaek here and watching the same glitter storm kick up on the horizon, but it's probably because everyone is too fucked up to care about relationship drama.

Hyojong doesn't know Jackson, but he kind of wants to know where he is, if only to thank him for the distraction.

Actually, he'd heard back downstairs that some people were looking for Jackson, but that's neither here nor there, now that they've made it out.

"You got out," Hwitaek says, circling the little powwow the pair of them have made to plop down at Hyuna's other side. "You said you didn't want to leave, but here you are."

"Can we not make this about our mistakes, or whatever?" Hyuna asks, at long last snatching up the sort-of abandoned pack of smokes that Hyojong had left between them and lighting one for herself.

"You don't smoke," Hwitaek points out with a snort.

"I don't have enough time left to die of cancer," Hyuna shoots back with a glare that twinkles, malicious, in the shimmering light of the moon.

They're quiet for a long time. In the distance, the glitter dances in endless swirling patterns, ominous and stunning all at once. Hyuna points out at it, peering with one eye closed down the length of her arm. "I want to go out into it," she declares, all authoritarian like Hyojong knows she can be. "You'd take me, wouldn't you?"

It doesn't escape anyone's notice that Hyojong's the first one she looks to, but no one says anything save Hwitaek, who awkwardly clears his throat.

"I'd take you," Hyojong murmurs, lips barely moving to let the smoke escape. "If you really wanted to go, we could go right now."

"We don't have our suits," Hwitaek says, a welcome interruption. At least now he knows to show caution where he didn't before. Cabin fever must do that to people, Hyojong reasons. "Do you want to go get them?"

"No," Hyuna tells them both firmly, and for the first time she meets Hwitaek's eye.

Slowly, cautiously, she slides into Hyojong's lap first, arms around his neck and drawing him into a lingering kiss. It's always amazed him, that she's so small and can put so much love into everything she does, this in particular. She then does the same with Hwitaek, as if welcoming him back into the fold.

The descent from the top of the bunker isn't a long one, just careful, the moonlight only helping so much to guide them. Beyond its perimeter the city is the same. Hyuna treads it first, their leader without meaning to be, though Hyojong finds the need to project her and it seems Hwitaek feels the same. She's shoeless, in her bra and her baggy jeans, bereft of jewelry and makeup.

She's the most beautiful thing Hyojong has ever seen. The glitter catches her profile, and she breathes it in because there's no time for _careful_ and _watch out_ when the world is ending.

Hyojong almost forgets, but it occurs to him as they're striding out into the still-same abandoned streets and storefronts that Hwitaek left the hatch door open.

He thinks, in this moment, that even if Hwitaek doesn’t _deserve_ forgiveness, he should have it anyway, that no one should die with the knowledge that they’re hated. While Hyuna peeks into shop windows, calling out to them about whether or not they should break into this one or that one, Hyojong sidles into Hwitaek’s periphery.

“I’m sorry I was such a dick,” is all he manages, for all the important words that well up inside him.

Hwitaek shakes his head. “You were just worried.” There’s a contemplative moment of silence, the only interruption Hyuna’s exclamations, and then Hwitaek reaches into the space between them, takes Hyojong’s hand.

They still in the middle of the empty street, and kiss like it’s the first time all over again.

Over their heads, the glitter seems to make noise. Like it’s alive. Like it approves.

A few seconds later, there’s the shattering of glass. The two of them part to be met with the glowing remnant of Hyuna’s glyph painted all along the building she’d wanted to climb into.

“You guys wanna fuck in the Gucci store?” She waggles her eyebrows, tongue out of her open mouth -- just a flash of lasciviousness before she’s back to the giggling girl they both fell in love with. “You know, like old times.”

Neither Hyojong nor Hwitaek need to be told twice.

/// 

Jongin, having passed on the pills and most of the drinks handed his way, thinks he very well might be the only person here who can pass a field sobriety test. Good for him, considering he’s so, so tired of the weird, slick sounds of people sucking face. Namely his best friend and his best friend's boyfriend, who've been attached at the mouth since they realised everyone was going to expire in a very short span of time.

It's because of this that he's sitting near the corner -- not quite the corner because Taemin and Wonsik are occupying it, having become a weird one-headed, two-mouthed, many-limbed cryptid the likes of which Jongin wouldn't hunt even if people _would_ watch his Youtube channel at this point. He sighs every so often, and nurses a beer while he chips at its sweating paper label with the blunt edge of a thumbnail. His stomach rumbles and Jongin thinks about what it might be like if there were something warm and delicious to eat, instead of something stuffed in those weird, shrinking metallic bags. Okay, he's thinking of soup. And sweaters. And the least sexy thoughts he can possibly manage considering the fact that as soon as sweaters occur to him, he's like, thinking about Taemin in one three sizes too big for him?

He isn't jealous. This isn't the part that grosses him out. Taemin's been around a long time, doing the thing with any number of partners. If he had something to be jealous about he'd do it, he being a possessive lover or whatever Taemin had told him his natal chart read. No, the gross part is that anyone -- his best friend included -- could even _kinda_ think about getting at least partly naked in this, their time of disaster.

When they'd gotten here at least Wonsik had been kind enough to save his end-of-the-world related horniness for when Jongin wasn't around. "Everyone has their own way," Wonsik had told him, head pillowed on Jongin's shoulder and looking up at him from beneath thick eyelashes. At the time, Jongin had been charmed, but now he's starting to think that maybe one or both of them had just been letting him down easy while secretly thinking he was weird.

He is weird, still.

Taemin had tried to invite him, of course, Taemin being interested in lots of things, the shape of Jongin's dick included. They'd spent long nights postulating about sex and friendship and what it might mean, back when they still had a chance at futures that might have ended involving one another. Jongin remembered starlight, glittering and glowing,; the line of Taemin’s profile as it was caught in the light of a golden summer moon; the way his best friend’s hand had fit in his. But now with the weight of everything bearing down on them, the possibility seems pretty fucking moot.

Maybe he is jealous.

The label comes off underneath Jongin's fingertip, here in the present day. He's still thinking of stars, and cursing himself for not tasting the mango balm always on Taemin’s lips when he had the chance. Maybe that's why it doesn't faze him at first, when he looks up at the ceiling and the tacky disco lights are catching a million times more than any mirror could account for.

He opens his mouth. He closes it again. He squints up into the thin trickle of glitter slowly pouring in from outside the main chamber of their bunker. At first he wonders if somehow someone might have slipped one of those pills into his drink. But no, no one's been near since Taemin and Wonsik started doing whatever they're doing.

"Guys?" he says, softly at first, but then he clears his throat and repeats in a voice reserved for the authoritative and the bold, "Guys, something's happening." It happens at the skip of one song into another, the gentle fading only serving to accentuate the severity of his tone. "There's glitter. Up on the ceiling."

The silence in the bunker is absolute.

And then a scream rips through the air, and there is chaos.

Taemin and Wonsik separate immediately, flanking Jongin on either side, arms wrapped around his almost protectively. Jongin shifts under this level of attention, moves so that Taemin's tiny ass is situated in the middle instead, and makes a face of great disapproval as they shuffle back to Taemin and Jongin's shared bunk.

It's still strewn with evidence of Wonsik's presence. Jongin has to smile at the mess the three of them have made. They all shake into their HAZMAT suits, one by one, the room too small for flinging limbs from two people, let alone three all at once. Wonsik's brows are knitted together as he hovers in the corner; Jongin manages to tear his eyes away from the shape of Taemin getting dressed over his already scarce clothes, goes to him, fits arms around him.

"It's okay," he murmurs into Wonsik's ear, lips catching a dangling earring, probably stolen from a friend the likes of whom Jongin has yet to meet. Doesn't seem to matter much now. "I've got you."

Wonsik fixes him with this soft chocolate gaze, and Jongin is reminded of summertime and of popsicles and cherry wine. Wonsik is one of his best friends, and they've been together near as long as he and Taemin have; makes sense they'd have some fond memories hiding behind those gorgeous eyes.

Jongin, at a loss for words, leans in and brushes his lips to the spot beneath Wonsik's ear. In a perfect world, in a kind world, he'd have time and mental space for more, for all the comfort Wonsik needs and deserves but is always too afraid to ask for.

The glitter starts filtering into their bunker just as Wonsik is getting his helmet on, and the valve makes this horrible hissing sound, like Wonsik is being burned from inside the suit but is struck too dumb to scream.

Outside the door, a thick throng of people are filing up to the ladder that leads out. Jongin overhears people screaming about finding another bunker to go to and gnaws at his bottom lip in worry, trying to peer through his companions' visors to see their faces. Wonsik is impassable, but Taemin of all people grins like a loon.

Of course he does. Jongin is in love all over again.

"I know a secret exit," he mumbles, so quietly it can barely be heard over the sounds of people snapping into their suits, the suction of military-grade polyurethane clinging to their skin. "Come on, follow me."

Jongin doesn't know what to make of how Taemin knows all these secrets that twinkle behind his eyes, but he trusts the way Taemin rests a hand at the small of each of their backs. "When we're safe again," he tells them, all mischief the way Jongin (and, apparently, Wonsik) had fallen in love with him, "you two are getting 'thank God we survived sex'." He blinks. “If you’re into that.”

Wonsik laughs so hard at this it sounds more like screaming, and Jongin shakes with it too. He curls a hand around Taemin's wrist, and they all go toward the back entrance that only Taemin knows.

“I’m into that,” he says into the endless void of love by which he’s surrounded. “I’m into you.”

///

Outside Jaehwan’s cell door, there is screaming of an indeterminate and indiscriminate nature. It sounds a lot like Wonsik, not that he’s listening or really cares much why Wonsik might be screaming. Jaehwan, for one, thinks this is a huge buzzkill. It has everything to do with the fact that Chanhyuk is whining from his perch above Jaehwan, and he’s got this wicked roll to his hips that leaves Jaehwan’s head a little spinny. Or is that the waking hangover? He can’t really tell, and doesn’t really care. All he can think about is more.

Chanhyuk’s high-pitched sigh of pleasure hits a certain octave, and Jaehwan jolts, petrified, beneath him. “Hey,” he asks slowly, “when was your last audition?”

It doesn’t matter that they’d never talked much about the theatre. Jaehwan knows what the fuck he’s talking about.

Chanhyuk, nervous and honestly still kiss-drowsy judging by the hood of his eyes, the heaviness of his body when he settles into Jaehwan to nose at the line of his jaw, rattles off a title, a producer. “Was gonna be a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, but weirder? Queerer? I don’t remember, exactly...”

Jaehwan makes a noise of great distress, rolls them both out of bed with his hands on Chanhyuk’s hips. “I got that lead. You were my competition.”

They’re quiet, staring for a long time into one another’s eyes.

“So, hatefucking?” suggests Jaehwan at long last, and Chanhyuk’s eyes sparkle.

He’s just getting his shaking hands to the buckle of Jaehwan’s belt when someone bursts into the room, causing several things to happen at once. Chanhyuk pinches his finger in the belt clasp. Jaehwan knocks his head on the steel-grate flooring. There is suddenly a tiny girl with beautifully straight hair standing over them. Funny, she looks a lot like Chanhyuk, thinks Jaehwan, dizziness washing over him anew.

Behind that girl is -- “_Fuck,_ what are you doing here?”

“We’re evacuating, I think,” says Taekwoon with a confidence that betrays his words entirely. He drags both hands through his dirty hair, and Jaehwan admires how long it’s gotten since they’ve been down here. “Do you want to leave?”

Chanhyuk is already being tugged away, so quick and with such strength that Jaehwan is amazed this girl doesn’t rip his shoulder from its socket. “We have to _go_, is this where you’ve been the entire time? Are you okay? Have you breathed in any of the glitter?”

“Glitter,” Chanhyuk repeats, still mostly hard and trying to find his shirt, though it seems a bit beside the point at this juncture. “There’s glitter?”

“Someone left the hatch door open,” says the girl with a roll of her eyes. While Chanhyuk clumsily searches for the couple articles of clothing he’d managed to lose in the last solid hour of making out, the girl dips to meet Jaehwan’s eyes. “Hi, I’m Suhyun, and I’m really sorry, but I don’t think you can sleep with my brother right now. We have to go find another bunker, like, _now_.” 

Taekwoon’s doing his part to peel Jaehwan from the floor, although Jaehwan’s still just loosey-goosey enough that it makes Taekwoon’s task a Sisyphean one. “Do you want to go or not?” he’s asking, and Jaehwan doesn’t have enough fucking brain cells left over to make much an answer. He grunts, and hopes Taekwoon gets the message when he flops into the arms tugging at him with that level of desperation.

“Suit up,” says Jaehwan with amusement colouring his voice.

///

Sunmi still has the taste of Seulgi on her lips when she draws Chungha into a kiss. "We have to go," she's mumbling, and Chungha just barely stirs with the sound of her girlfriend's voice, the taste that floods her tongue, honeyed and with a tang of bodily salt.

Chungha's not yet found her clothes, but it doesn't matter, because Sunmi is shoving her suit at her instead. "Whassat," Chungha slurs, limbs still heavy with the weight of a few good orgasms and an equally good nap. She doesn't know how much time has passed, but when things fall quiet save the sound of Seulgi still breathing, even and calm, Chungha realises that there is no one else continuing the party they'd left.

The bunker is empty, save the three of them.

"There's glitter," Sunmi says, clipped, not short, she as tender as she can be given she's trying to put clothes on before shimmying into her own HAZMAT getup. "It's in the bunker. We have to wake Seulgi up. We have to _leave_."

"And go where?" asks Chungha, halting over the brief syllables, the ideas coming so slowly she thinks she might be broken. "If there's no one else here, everyone's already gone where they're going to go..."

Seulgi stirs at last, when Sunmi trails fingers down her back, short nails scritching at her spine until she stretches, hips lifting from the tiny bed, feline and feminine and beautiful. Chungha has never believed in love at first sight, but then again, if this had been the way in which she'd first seen Seulgi, hair in loose, sweat-damp waves at her crown and her eyes heavy-lidded and the bare arch of her back, her stomach, her thighs...well, she might believe in anything after that.

"We only have our own suits," Chungha points out, flatly, trying and failing to keep the traces of attraction out of her voice. Sunmi laughs. "Do you know where to go find one?"

"I've been awake ten minutes, I already found one," Sunmi giggles, pointing to the pile of government grey plastic piled up in the corner.

“You were walking around naked?” Seulgi, too, has wonder in her voice, she making no pretension of looking Sunmi up and down as she shakes her hips, the tautness of her suit as she finally gets it on tantalising to them both. Like she couldn't hide a secret even if she tried.

"Yeah, no one else is here." Sunmi shrugs, tucks her hair into her gas mask. "Really. It's empty. I don't know where they went. But we can't stay here, you know? There's a bunch of glitter, and I haven't figured out where the ventilation is that doesn't let in _more_ glitter, although trust me, I've definitely tried."

"Do you want to go?" Chungha turns her attention to Seulgi once again, who has pulled a thin sheet round herself for modesty reasons that make no earthly sense here. Chungha snaps shut her mouth, her jaw aching from hanging open so shamelessly for so long. "I'm serious, do you want to leave this bunker? In here it's glitter, out there it's glitter." She glances up at the ceiling; the multicoloured mess hasn't thickened here where it might have in other places. "There isn't much difference, and I don't really feel like moving."

Seulgi looks from one face to another. "I don't know. What do the two of you want to do?"

Sunmi's shoulders sag. Chungha knows that, as messed up as it is, her girlfriend had probably looked forward to the heroine antics. "I mean, obviously I don't want to walk around in a dressed-up version of a garbage bag, but what if..." Sunmi's voice catches in her throat. "What if we die of exposure?"

"It's the same either way," Chungha says, steely and solid. "I want to stay with the two of you for as long as I can."

Seulgi nods. "That sounds like a better option than running and trying to hide in someone else's bunker." She pauses, looks like she's trying to decide something, then finally agrees with herself. "I didn't leave my ship behind to run away anyway."

Everyone's quiet, and then Sunmi breaks into a high-pitched laugh. "Who wants to help me out of this thing?"

/// 

Yoongi must admit, he's not fond of the notion of being one of the first to break the surface. There are so many bodies just trying to live that he doesn't know if he'll even make it out. He's not stupid, he'd seen Taemin lead his two fool fake boyfriends out the back entrance in an attempt to make it around the horde, but then other people had seen them travelling, followed suit.

No, Yoongi doesn't want to move just yet, practicality taking over. He'll later blame his own laziness. As will, more than likely, Namjoon, who's clutching at his arm, all claws out.

"Hey, can you quit holding so tight?" Yoongi winces as Namjoon presses fingernail crescents into Yoongi's skin even through his suit. "Seriously, you're hurting me."

"Sorry," mumbles Namjoon, "just..."

Yoongi doesn't know how that sentence ends; there's a lot of emotions, a lot of words that could fill the space between the two of them. He relents, his hardness doing him little service right now, when Namjoon, his one friend, the only man he's ever wanted to spend more than half an hour fully clothed with, is in obvious panic.

It doesn't help they've picked up this ritual of pacing together. The floors might have grooves if they weren't metal. Namjoon follows back and forth as Yoongi walks the length of the emptied-out main chamber of the bunker, the space that had been for living, repurposed for dying, it seems. "I'm just waiting until less people are running to the door," Yoongi says quietly.

"I know." Namjoon's nothing if not fairly logical -- not to the degree that Yoongi is, of course, his voice rising higher with every utterance leaving his mouth -- and can see the benefit of waiting without having to be explained to. "I know, it's just… I thought I was okay with all this and I'm not, you know? It's hard to reconcile the idea of accepting death with wanting to live, and the idea of wanting to live with knowing you can't, and I wonder if this is how terminally ill people feel about it? Are we like cancer patients? The people who get into bad accidents and know they're going to succumb to their wounds?"

Yoongi holds the space, bites his lip, keeps himself from saying that might interrupt whatever process this might be. He doesn't listen to just anyone, and doesn’t think he’s very good at it, but that's just fine. This is better than the party, than the gossip he'd missed in his hours of compulsive napping, than the look on Namjoon's face as he pretended to care who was screwing who.

It had been a good look. This is still superior.

"We're going to get out of here, and we're going to live as long as we can, and I promise," and here they stop pacing, Yoongi turning so they're nose-to-nose, Yoongi's palms cupped around Namjoon's cheeks, "I promise that you're going to do whatever it is you want to do before you die."

Namjoon's hands are at Yoongi's face, now, too, and they're looking at one another with such intensity that Yoongi nearly tries shrinking away. Nearly. He holds fast at the last minute, and Namjoon presses their foreheads together.

"You're my only friend."

It's a stark revelation -- Namjoon always has people he's talking to, always surrounds himself with younger people that look at him while he lectures with stars in their eyes, always has people who want to bed him down for his voice or his mind or his thighs alone. Yoongi knows these things, and yet he is Namjoon's only friend, here and now, in this reality.

"You're my only friend, too," Yoongi says after a long moment of quiet, the echoes of feet pounding against metal dying down at long last. "And as my friend I'm gonna fuckin' keep you alive so I can make fun of you over how cheesy that was, later," he adds, grinning. "C'mon, I think the front entrance is safe?"

Namjoon nods, and dusts their noses together, and Yoongi colours the softest shade of pink, all the way down his throat.

///

The melee of running from one bunker to the next closest one, it turns out, can be deadly. Or at least, that’s how it looks to Mark, who’s of average height and trying to get the fuck out just the same as anyone standing next to him.

Taeyong's gloved hand is in his own, and it reminds him of café dates and inappropriate conversations and waiting to kiss because they couldn't take their masks off in public. Their suits crinkle loudly as they dash across the emptied landscape.

As they pass the ruined storefront on a particular corner Mark swears he can hear the loudest and most obscene moaning. He wasn't aware that people still made porn, given the worldly circumstances. He’s careful to circumvent the broken glass littering the sidewalk, but it doesn’t matter, everyone’s going to get cut anyway.

Taeyong trips at one point, some traffic cone bullshit, and it doesn’t miss the mark, the irony of being kept out blocking someone’s safety. Mark goes down with him, and they’re sure they’ll be trampled in the rush. It happens that they’re helped to their feet by a young girl that Mark thinks he’s seen somewhere before, not that he can discern her face from anyone else’s when everyone’s wearing a gas mask. Only when she speaks, asking Taeyong if he’s alright, does Mark realise it’s Yerim under there, and breathes a sigh of relief.

Then they keep running. It’s fucking Pamplona out here, but there’s no one waving a red flag, just glitter threatening to sneak under the seams of poorly-constructed, time-and-exercise worn suits. 

Mark’s lungs burn, but he never once lets go of Taeyong’s hand, feeling every bit the Orpheus to Taeyong’s Eurydice.

When at last they reach their destination the multitudes of crashing bodies have thinned. Mark does his best not to think about the different friends and enemies and complete strangers he’d jumped over in his quest to live out a futile life. He wonders, however briefly, what God was up there, what plan could be in place that his life was more or less important than theirs. It does not escape his notice the people who are missing; his pessimism, acquired over the past few months, points it out to him in a voice that eerily echoes his own. Sunmi and Chungha are gone. Hyojong and Hyuna and Hwitaek are gone. A couple of the girls who’d been taking up the floor playing spin the bottle like it was middle school all over again. There’s a few other missing faces.

It does, however, bring him some joy to see people he recognises. Namjoon sobs, his head pillowed on Yoongi’s shoulder, relief clear in both their faces even through the thick glass of their gas masks. Suhyun and her brother, Chanhyuk, are taking glyph-coded notes in a notebook, archaic and almost folksy. Jaehwan and Taekwoon are talking -- good, thinks Mark; they haven’t spoken since their arrival, and Mark had known what sorts of friends they’d been when they first showed up.

The bunker door swings open, lets in people two at a time. Jinyoung and Doyoung are there, familiar faces, even tangentially. Mark takes his time to catch his breath as the line files in two-by-two, ends up slumping against the wall of the entryway that’s crowded with similarly wheezing and heavily perspiring bodies. Some of them had brought some of Jackson’s kind gifts with them, clutching at them like lifelines, as if any of it _matters_.

Taeyong finally lets go when they’d made it, but he’s standing in front of Mark again now, breathing just as hard, the sound that escapes his mask something of a Star Wars wheeze.

“You wanna fuck in this bunker?” asks Taeyong, and Mark doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“I love you,” Mark says, and it’s the first time he’s ever said it to someone whose blood he didn’t share, but he means it regardless.

Taeyong shifts from foot to foot, and then takes Mark by both wrists, pulling him to his feet, the suddenness of the rise making him spin anew. They embrace, their suits making the most horrible noise, and for the first time Mark begins to sob, all the mourning he hadn’t done rearing its ugly head.

Taeyong, though, just cradles him, pats his back, traces his glyph of calming into the soft valley between Mark’s shoulderblades and tells him “it’s okay” and “cry if you need to”. It was all that hippy bullshit Mark had sworn to himself, when the first escape crafts had taken flight, he wouldn’t give into, not if it meant he could accept grimly what it was they were in for.

He lifts his mask, and Taeyong does too, and it doesn’t matter if the glitter is going to get them now, because it’s coming for everyone sooner or later. For now, they have this embrace, and the party at the end of the world, and nothing short of impending doom can stop them.

/// 

In an escape ship that's taken to the sky, Jackson peers into the screen of a tablet, a video streaming in. His leg is shaking, his hat has been discarded in favour of him dragging fingers through his hair repeatedly, he's worrying at his bottom lip with his front teeth.

It doesn't suit him, this level of care, but he cares nonetheless.

The bunker he'd been watching so fervently had alerted him a while ago that the door had been left open -- though he hadn't built the place, he being not even near rich enough to fund the project, when he'd gotten his party-planning idea he'd at least had the foresight to ask for security -- and he'd watched as people trickled, then flooded out. The tang of tin tickled the tip of his tongue every now and again, and occasionally he got up, paced the floor of the ship, its luxury evident in the amount of space it allowed him for movement.

"They're just," he manages at long last, setting the tablet down carefully, it being the only means of private communication between this ship and the last. "They're going to make it, I know they are..."

A deep voice rumbles through from the bedroom, the bay doors still open from when Jackson had marched out into what might be termed a living room in more civilised times. "They're going to make it," says the voice. "Have you checked the other feed to see if they've got people coming in?"

"Oh, that's a good idea." Jackson's barely got strength to go above a whisper; he shoves his hand through his cocoa-coloured locks again. "Yeah, hold on." He does exactly what's suggested of him, obedient to a fault even outside the bedroom, listening trained into him by a stern hand. The power of money, he supposes, or perhaps the power of _power_ as it'd seeped into his bones some months ago.

The third bunker is allowing people inside, two by two, and the biblical parallel isn't lost on Jackson, who's never been to church a day in his life but knows all the stories by heart. Cacophony streams in through rich speakers. The gathering of bodies is something he can practically breathe in through the screen. He doesn't know everyone; he's only one man, how could he have possibly met everyone that's ever attended one of his parties? But he knows enough to conclude that they're safe, for the time being.

"All I wanted was for them to have a good time," says Jackson, interrupting an otherwise quiet silence as he's typically wont to do.

"They did have a good time," points out the voice, and there's something serious laced into it that has Jackson padding, barefoot and with sweatpants slung low round his hips, back into the bedroom and diving for the comfort of arms that fit, perfect and strong and snug, around his waist. "And when we get to the colony, you can throw as many parties as you want. I know I won't be the richest man on the station, but I'll be able to give you whatever you want in that regard."

Jackson looks up, is met with a perfect and arched eyebrow. "You promise, Daddy?"

"Of course, baby." Those same arms give him a squeeze, and a kiss brushes dead between his brows.

"I shouldn't have left them." Now he's contemplative, watching out the window of their bedroom, small as it may be by their usual standards.

"What use is that thinking?" asks Daddy, lips warm against the shell of Jackson's ear. "Do you feel guilty? Should I teach you to take better care of your thoughts?"

That, at least, perks up his mood. The tablet forgotten, the party over for him, he rolls over, connecting lips to lips and hips to hips. “Promise me you’ll stop checking in for a while,” says Daddy, with a touch of worry in his tone.

“Yeah, it can wait.” Jackson’s already a little breathless, all the anxious movement having taken the fight right out of him. “The party’s not over until the world is, right?” He beams like he’s told his proudest joke and, perhaps, in a sense, he has.


End file.
